ewriting, weighing his cadences, beginning over and over
again, grudging no patience, no trouble if only it might be pretty good;
good enough to print and sell to a reading public which had become
critical. He glanced through the manuscript in his hand, and to his
astonishment, he could not help thinking that in its measure it was
decent work. After three months his prose seemed fresh and strange as if
it had been wrought by another man, and in spite of himself he found
charming things, and impressions that were not commonplace. He knew how
weak it all was compared with his own conceptions; he had seen an
enchanted city, awful, glorious, with flame smitten about its
battlements, like the cities of the Sangraal, and he had molded his copy
in such poor clay as came to his hand; yet, in spite of the gulf that
yawned between the idea and the work, he knew as he read that the thing
accomplished was very far from a failure. He put back the leaves
carefully, and glanced again at Messrs Beit's list. It had escaped his
notice that _A Bad Un to Beat_ was in its third three-volume edition. It
was a great thing, at all events, to know in what direction to aim, if he
wished to succeed. If he worked hard, he thought, he might some day win
the approval of the coy and retiring Miranda of _Smart Society_; that
modest maiden might in his praise interrupt her task of disinterested
advertisement, her philanthropic counsels to "go to Jumper's, and mind
you ask for Mr. C. Jumper, who will show you the lovely blue paper with
the yellow spots at ten shillings the piece." He put down the pamphlet,
and laughed again at the books and the reviewers: so that he might not
weep. This then was English fiction, this was English criticism, and
farce, after all, was but an ill-played tragedy.

The rejected manuscript was hidden away, and his father quoted Horace's
maxim as to the benefit of keeping literary works for some time "in the
wood." There was nothing to grumble at, though Lucian was inclined to
think the duration of the reader's catarrh a little exaggerated. But this
was a trifle; he did not arrogate to himself the position of a small
commercial traveler, who expects prompt civility as a matter of course,
and not at all as a favor. He simply forgot his old book, and resolved
that he would make a better one if he could. With the hot fit of
resolution, the determination not to be snuffed out by one refusal upon
him, he began to beat about in his mi